Its old news that late 2008 and most of 2009 saw the worst economic downturn since the great depression in the 1930s. The stunningly large numbers of corporate and personal bankruptcies, crashing financial markets, currency devaluation, massive layoffs, work outsourcing to "best cost" centers and rising unemployment are things that most of us have not witnessed in our lifetimes. For many people these things have hit us personally….its not just impersonal news stories, it is happening in our own cities and in our own lives. To say that these things are extremely disconcerting is a gross understatement!

When dramatic and disconcerting things like this happen, we as human beings, tend to react in a dramatically defensive manner. We create bailout packages, rules, laws, organizations and structures that try to protect what we currently have and the lifestyle that we are or have been used to. This is self preservation behavior which is "pre-wired" into our human brains. However, this is not the correct response. What we should be doing is re-inventing ourselves to take advantage of our strengths and apply these reinventions to our lives, careers and industries.

Take a look at the North American auto manufacturing business which employed thousands of people and created billions of dollars for its owners and the local and global economies. Its not hard to show a correlation between the rising cost of workers (wage increases, workplace concessions, benefits packages, retirement programs, etc.), declining productivity of those same workers and the decline in the profitability of the car manufacturing business. Now don't get me wrong, I am not a union basher as I do believe that the role of the union can be important to our workforce in certain circumstances. But in this case, think about all the money and effort that went into the;

- Creation of the unions

- The work actions that were staged by the workers to protect the rights, wages and benefits of the workers

- The counter measures staged by the owners to try and minimize worker cost and protect profit margins

- The laws that were enacted to protect the workers and more laws that were enacted to protect the corporations

- Bailout packages from government

- Subsidies from the government

- Tariffs on foreign competitive products

I don't have any figures for this but the time, effort, and cost of this is astronomical!!!

What do you think the results would have been if the auto industry would have taken the astronomical amount of money and effort spent on these things and applied it instead to innovation and re-invention programs. I know at this point it is speculative but I believe in the creativeness and inventiveness of the human spirit and I firmly believe that the auto industry would be in a much better position today had they done this. They would be significantly advanced in technology and manufacturing techniques, their workers would be retrained and advanced, they would not be fighting over wages and benefits because they would have invented ways to manufacture better products at lower costs in shorter timeframes at higher margins thus paying for the higher cost workers with their higher margins.

What does this have to do with your Strength Zone? A few things;

1. When bad things happen to you in your career, don't panic and move into a defensive, protectionist mode. Instead, go on the offensive. Re-evaluate your current career against your Strength Zone. How can you apply your Strength Zone differently and more productively to ensure that you are marketable. Be innovative and re-invent yourself. Get back out there into the marketplace and always leverage your Strength Zone in everything you do.

2. Don't wait for something bad to happen. Constantly evaluate your effectiveness and how you are applying your Strength Zone to the different roles that you have. Always innovate, re-invent and tweak your performance to get better.

3. Finally, until we instill a culture of working within our Strength Zone, innovation and re-invention within ourselves and our corporations we will always remain at high risk of extinction in the marketplace.